Blackburn striker Yakubu responded to recent speculation that he’d been spending too much time at the Pizza Hut buffet in spectacular fashion today, when he scored twice in Blackburn’s 4-3 win over Arsenal.

After the game, the Nigerian wheezed: “Once I’d run off the massive stitch I got in the first five minutes I was bang up for it.

“To be honest, I really hope those goals serve to shut a few people up.

“I’m happy to admit that being offered all the fried chicken I could eat played rather a large part in my decision to come here, but I think I’ve shown today that you don’t have to be a size zero to play this game.”

Blackburn manager Steve Kean reckons his striker is a fantastic role model to youngsters who could do with losing a few pounds: “Little ruddy-cheeked podgsters all over the country will have seen Yak’s performance today and gone, ‘if a lard-arse like him can cut it in the Premier League then why can’t I play for my school’s under 9s?’.

Tottenham fans had reason to celebrate this weekend, after learning that Harry Redknapp might not have signed Scott Parker just because he understands what a throw-in is and never forgets to feed his dog.

After two and a half years of stockpiling ‘t’riffic pros’ and ‘great lads’ who couldn’t hit a barn door but were always happy to collect up the cones at the end of training, there were signs that Redknapp might have started another round of character recruitment with his deal for the ex-Hammer on deadline day.

John Grimshaw, from Chigwell, explains: “Harry re-signed Robbie Keane’s shadow for being ‘great in the dressing room’, so when you see him sitting next to Parker saying things like ‘good family man’ and ‘great around the place’, you do fear the worst.”

Parker’s excellent debut on Saturday dispelled such fears though : “We were pleasantly surprised – and obviously a massively relieved – to see that this one can also do stuff like run and pass the ball to a team mate.”

Dutchman Vorm, who appeared to be eliminating team mate Angel Rangel in an imaginary game of Dodgeball, has since claimed that hilarious moments of complete and utter fist-in-mouth calamity are part and parcel of the entertainment of football, and if Gomes isn’t around to produce them then someone else needs to step up.

“Look, people pay good money to be entertained, so if the game is likely to be a drab 0-0 bore then something needs to be done.

“Whether it’s spooning a straightforward shot over the line, hareing wildly after a loose ball and giving a penalty away, or just pelting it at your own right back when he’s not looking, a goalkeeper has so much power to entertain the fans.

“No goalkeeper understands this better than Gomes, so it’s sad to see that he’s not playing. That one was for him.”

Finally, it was confirmed yesterday that Fernando Torres only moved to Chelsea in January because he wanted more spare time to focus on his attempt to build a time machine.

The £50 million striker’s lack of recent game time has seen the Spaniard make good progress in his bid to travel back to the summer of 2008 when everything was lovely and he didn’t look like he wanted to cry all the time.

A club source told us: “The fact that Sturridge and Anelka started ahead of him on Saturday didn’t concern Fernando at all. In fact, he was in great spirits.

“Basically, he’d managed to track down a man who was willing to sell him his 1981 DeLorean DMC-12. This is exciting because – given the work Fernando has done since January on his version of the Flux Capacitor – he reckons he’ll be back in 2008 by Christmas.”

The BBC confirmed today that Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker have bet fellow pundit Mark Lawrenson that he won’t be able do a single interview this season without mentioning Liverpool at least once.

The two ex-England strikers made the wager after hearing the news that the BBC had received a record number of complaints last weekend when football fans – excited about the start of the new season – tuned in to BBC One, only to be reminded that they would have to share the highs and lows of the next nine months with the insufferable Scouse moron.

Tony Grimshaw, a Wolves fan, raged: “I got so pumped up for the new season that I’d totally forgotten about what a massive tool he is. Honestly, it’s like being invited to a party at the Playboy mansion subject to the previso that you’ll take Anne Widdecombe with you.”

Supporters are so fed up that they have decided to form an action group that will ask the BBC to justify Lawrenson’s employment. Kevin Franks, the man behind it all says that enough is enough:

“I’m pretty sure that lengthy analysis of Liverpool’s title aspirations with an old mate, followed by a brief and lazy dismissal of any other team not in the top four isn’t really in the spirit of a supposedly non-biased public broadcaster.

“The fact that he still thinks his shit puns are funny after so many years of no one laughing is almost as amazing as the BBC’s inability to prevent a discussion about Bolton’s midfield from veering off on to a wank-fest over Luis Suarez.”

Gary Lineker confirmed: “He’s an utter nightmare to control. One minute we’re discussing Tony Pulis’ defensive organisation against Chelsea, and the next we’re back on to why Lawro thinks Andy Carroll is better than Sergio Aguero.

“Alan and I are hoping that the bet might force him into taking an interest in a few other clubs, but we’re not holding out any hope. At the cafeteria this morning he challenged the dinner lady to find him a better young English prospect than Jordan Henderson.

“She’d only asked him whether he wanted fried bread with his bacon.”

Lawrenson has since defended himself: “I don’t really understand what all the fuss is about – I talk about other clubs all the time.

“In fact, I was doing an interview with Martin Jol just this morning, and I told him what I told the Fulham fans – you’re not going to achieve anything this season so you should probably just give up now. I said the same to Tony Pulis last week.

“I mean that winger they’ve got is useless. They should have signed Stewart Downing – what a buy that is for Liverpool. With Henderson feeding him out wide, Suarez with a little bit of movement, Carroll with the…

Aston Villa today publicly submitted a transfer request on behalf of Emile Heskey, claiming that their ambition exceeds the talent at the disposal of the former England striker.

In an interview with Croatian newspaper Sportske Novosti the midlands club are reported to have said: “Frankly we feel disappointed that Emile hasn’t buggered off yet.

“Last summer we made a gentleman’s agreement that if a club matching his natural talent came in for him, then he wouldn’t stop us from trying to get him off our books. Naturally we are therefore extremely disappointed to hear that he has chosen to reject today’s offer from Rochdale.”

Villa fan John Yeates is a bit pissed off about it all: “In “In dendrological terms, Emile Heskey is an old Oak – large and looming, a wooden presence that apparently takes a fucking age to move when you’ve had enough of it.

“Analogies aside though, a football club really cannot win these days. If a Premier League player manages to take a break from shagging Page 3 birds long enough to actually play an acceptable few games of football, all the club seems to get in return is a few grumblings from the player about ambition, and a public flirtation with the first Russian bloke to throw him an extra wheelbarrow of gold.

“On the flip side, if the player turns to shit and becomes the bench warming equivalent of Bill Cosby’s zombie, the fucker still hangs around collecting his wages like some sort of expensive eggy fart. You have to question where that supposed ambition went to, don’t you?”

Heskey defended his stance on Twitter: “Look, as I have said many times in the past, I am trying to build for the future and staying on a wage that in no way matches my footballing ability is essential to that.

Sky Sports News today announced that the word ‘saga’ means whatever the hell they want it to mean, and if football fans didn’t like it they could simply switch to another channel.

The 24-hour sports channel – once described as ‘like having the Sun shouted at you by two robots dressed as bankers’ – was responding to criticism that their continued exaggeration of mundane sports stories via the irresponsible mis-use of supporting vocabulary, has been ruining the lives of stupid people who now think that absolutely everything is an outrageously exciting ‘saga’.

Proving the point, George Franks – who has been watching Sky Sports News avidly since the season ended on the 22nd May – was asked what had actually happened in the 58 days he has spent glued to his sofa.

“Oh, it’s all been kicking off hasn’t it?! There was the time that a man with moustache spent a day outside White Hart Lane to catch a glimpse of Luka Modric walking through a door. What a moment in the saga that was, eh?!

“What else? Oh yeah, there was the time that the bloke with the big chin brought up a picture of Wesley Sneijder on his flashy touch screen and revealed that the saga involving him joining United could be nearing a conclusion. Sky sources revealed.

“It turns out they made the whole thing up, but it kept me up all night eating Pop-Tarts waiting for the ‘Breaking News’ that was always promised every half hour after the ad breaks.

“It’s true though, I do find it hard not to turn everything into a saga these days. I can’t make breakfast without an internal commentary breaking the news that my slice of Warburton’s Seeded Batch ‘has made a dramatic move to join Toast FC on a short term contract’.

“My girlfirend has left me of course. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have broken the news on Twitter that ‘the blowjob deal had finally been agreed’.”

A Sky spokesman was unashamed of the channel’s tactics: “Sky Sports News is one of our flagship stations, and it is absolutely ghastly isn’t it?

“However, it’s a fantastic money spinner. We have learnt that if you persistently drip-feed thick people with “BREAKING NEWS” exclusives every 15 minutes, then they will happily accept spending 90% of their time watching goals from League Two and boring press conferences with Rotherham’s new assistant manager.

“They will certainly not change the channel, and frankly we don’t really care if the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t deem Cesc Fabregas buying a pint of milk as ‘another chapter in the ongoing saga’. We say it is, so it is. That’s the end of it.

The levels of unemployment caused by the closure of News Of The World will not be as high as first anticipated, after it emerged that all of the paper’s football news is written by a computer called ‘TIM’.

The ‘Tabloid Imitation Machine’ serves almost all of Britain’s tabloid newspapers, using a unique algorithm to churn out an inhuman quantity of tiresome daily transfer gossip during football’s two annual transfer windows.

TIM’s inventor, a 10 year old child from Rotherham, explains its simplicity: “Look, it’s so fucking formulaic. Even a blind monkey with a broken crayon could do it.

“You just do two things – generate a list of players who you have decided are available for transfer, and then simply find out which clubs have a new billionaire owner.

“Once you’ve done that, it’s easy. Pick a club, pick a player, buff it out with a load of meaningless words and you’re done.

“You can see why you don’t actually need a journalist for the job. My computer pumps out four stories a minute, and can work for ten hours solid without once attempting to tap Colleen Rooney’s phone or knock off at 3pm to go to the pub.

“Plus – with its list of classic non-commital tabloid words and phrases such as ‘our sources suggest’, ‘it is understood’, ‘could’, ‘may’ and ‘rumoured to be’ – every story that TIM produces will have the quintessential tabloid stench of fabricated horse manure.”

Still waiting for some decent players to arrive, Blackburn Rovers fan George O’Keef isn’t a fan of TIM’s journalism: “This year my club was taken over by some Indians who claimed to have made loads of money from selling chicken wings or something.

“Based on such claims, you can see why the tabloid machine started churning out stories linking us with the world’s top players.

“However, I can’t help but think that – before lazily linking us to every player under the sun – a real journalist would have first checked to see if the owners were telling the truth. I mean, how much money can you really make out of selling a chicken?

TIM’s inventor scoffs at such claims: “I’m sorry, but the term ‘real journalist’ has never – and will never – be applicable to the tabloid press.”